Lois Lane’s Rooftop Riunite

Posted on October 2, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

Wine is not part of the American visual vocabulary of virtue, in the way that breakfast cereals, completely undeservingly, are.

Look there in the bottom left hand corner of the frame. While more a function of product placement than set-design, the Kent family’s box of Cheerios implies happy childhoods and growing children, a story unbrokenly told by generations of marketers through summery television commercials. If a director alternatively placed a Cheerios box amongst domestic strife, it would read like it automatically belonged there. Perhaps it should, complicit as it is in the destruction of small family agriculture in America. Yet marketing triumphs, while the Kents innocently harbor the agent of their coming obsolescence. In a way, the Cheerios box stands alongside Mrs. Kent, also looking out onto the grown Clark, knowing it has raised him well, understanding that he will soon be heading out for the adult world of coffee and hotel breakfast buffets.

I digress. Of course wines are not depicted as a nostalgic childhood artifacts– at least not for protestant, white, American families following WWII. Things are slowly changing, and filmmakers and sitcom directors increasingly picture it on dinner tables, and as a relatable half-vice for full-time mothers– just not often in sight when the kids are around. Light substance abuse is a hallmark of dysfunctional family comedies, and wine’s refined enough to seem a little less scary. Wine can be a part of family, with reservations. Yet when does wine become a part of childhood fantasy and play acting? If there ever was a Champagne or Martini Barbie, its assuredly retired, but that doesn’t prevent young girls from imaginatively filling in the blanks, and the tiny pink play glasses. Wine, consistently portrayed as a feminine and aristocratic drink in America, plays a trickier role in fantasies about masculinity. Bruce Wayne might drink it as part of his alias– but would Batman? Would Professor X from the X-Men, because he’s sophisticated and European? Catwoman, because she’s a femme fatale? These seem the most likely– the image becomes incongruous with the Punisher, Deadpool or Spiderman. Oenophiliac villains would be another conversation, as would romantic interests. Which brings us to the other brand-name consumer good not-so-prominently placed in the 1978 film Superman: A bottle of sparkling white wine with an obscured, and perhaps defaced label, pounded by Lois Lane while anxiously awaiting an ‘interview session’ with Superman.
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Through most of the scenes, the filmmakers turn the label away from the camera, exposing a prominent bar code and a back label likely filled with marketing copy. Lois might live in a penthouse with a landscaped roof deck, but she drinks a reliable, commercial brand. More mysteriously, she’s brought out Champagne flutes, but the bottle doesn’t look like a sparkling wine. Champagne bottles and their imitators typically have long neck foils, and a horizontal label. With the exception of the collar label, it somewhat looks like a bottle of Riunite from the advertisement below, also from 1978.

For those unfamiliar with the slogan “Riunite on Ice, That’s Nice,” Riunite was like the brand-specific prosecco of its day– cheap, fizzy and from northern Italy. Riunite is a prominent brand of Lambrusco, a type of sparkling red wine from Emilia-Romagna, which is northeast of Tuscany. Sparkling red wine is a bit of an anomaly, and while there are a handful produced around the world (particularly in Australia,) Lambrusco might be the most traditional– less a fun experiment, and more of a regional speciality. Different provinces make different variations, which differ in terms of dryness and sweetness, and what kinds of grape varietals are used. Riunite is an example of the sweetest and darkest type of Lambrusco, Lambrusco Reggiano, which is made with a higher percentage of Ancellotta grapes:

This is the wine that took America by storm in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when the Cantine Riunite of Reggio nell’Emilia, a consortium of co-operatives, succeeded in exporting up to 3 million cases per year to the United States. So successful has Lambrusco been on export markets that special white, pink, and light versions have perversely been created, the colour and alcohol often being deliberately removed.

-Daniel Thomases and David Gleave, The Oxford Companion to Wine

Riunite combated this with the claim that Riunite white “is natural,” a good reminder to natural wine producers everywhere that the term is easily pirated by industrial producers. If Lois is in fact drinking white Riunite, it shows her to be rather tasteless– a charming, bizarre twist on the luxurious tableau she presents to Superman. Her choice is fashionable, but uneducated. It doesn’t look like Lois grew up around wine, or has taught herself wine. Does Lois make enough at the Daily Planet to afford her designer wardrobe and penthouse? Or did she inherit it? Superhero stories are all about origin narratives, but despite Lois’s status as “the archetypal ‘comic book love interest,'” her biography isn’t part of the cultural consciousness (or even immediately discoverable on Wikipedia.) Lois is a well-dressed, spunky career woman living in a beautifully appointed home, partaking of the best known brands of 1978– not unlike a Barbie doll with corporate tie-ins. But where did she come from?

Still, its possible she is not drinking Riunite. The logo isn’t very visible on Lois’ bottle, nor is there a screwcap wrapper. A motivated set crew could have blotted out and removed labels and foils so as to deny Riunite accidental sponsorship, or incorporation into the Superman brand. Its possible they needed a bottle of wine, ran to the nearest liquor store, and picked out a bottle from a prominent case display. It’s hard to know how clued in these guys were to detail, considering that two different sets of wine glasses appear on the table over the course of the interview.

Besides giving Lois a little liquid courage, the wine gives Superman the opportunity to look good abstaining, to make a half-joke, (“I never drink when I fly.”) When she writes up the piece, Lois assumes that Superman doesn’t drink at all, which makes Eve Teschmacher, Lex Luthor’s girl friend, coo with desire. After a bout of disarmingly cute sex banter, supposedly a hard-news interview, Lois and Superman fly over Manhattan and into the night sky, where Lois free-styles a rhyming poem. Utterly smitten after the visit, she monikers him, (“What a super… man.”) The winning performances and odd-ball quality of these moments easily make them the best part of the movie not involving Gene Hackman. After dropping Lois back off at the apartment, Superman swings around as his alter-ego Clark Kent, reminding a dazzled and distracted Lois that they have a date. This affords Superman a chance to make one more joke about the wine, this time at Lois’ expense. “You haven’t been–hmm?” He asks, miming her drinking with his pinky extended, lips puckered, and eyelids semi-closed.

Of course she was drinking. You were there, jerk. And of course you know the real reason she’s swooning. Lois Lane is savvy, but she’s comedic relief. And despite the overblown comparisons of Superman to Jesus, (only exacerbated in the 2013 Man of Steel,) Superman isn’t a saint. He’s duplicitous enough to schedule two dates with Lois as two different people, just for voyeuristic kicks. He seems charmed by her imperfections, but not in awe of her abilities, (although he appreciates her wit.) Superman isn’t a farm boy innocent, falling head over heels in love. He’s effortlessly in control, and he’s amused by her inability to see his true identity, and only passingly guilt-ridden. Superman acts less ‘salt of the earth,’ than like a cheeky business-school brat. Lois is the love interest not because she is ‘super’ herself, but because she’s a normal girl who was there at the right place, at the right time. She makes adorable, and sometimes deadly, mistakes– she publishes Superman’s weakness in the public paper, and can’t think fast enough to escape a broadening fault line. She drinks cheap, trendy plonk while dressed like a timeless Egyptian princess. Lois Lane could be anyone, so why do audiences need to know anything about her? She’s ultimately helpless– a remarkably feminine ‘Common Man’ that Superman dedicates his life to love and save. And drop thousands of feet above the ground. And get mugged at gunpoint. No hard feelings.

And what’s happened to Riunite since 1978? It didn’t age well, but sales are still holding strong in states with more labyrinthine liquor laws, like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Riunite, once advertised as the wine of happening twenty-somethings, is now a proudly-unfashionable staple of the heartland. Riunite’s producers understand that, releasing a highly publicized TAPS campaign for veterans, an RV tour, and a smart line of ads riffing on the datedness of their jingle from 1985. One could imagine that they’d love to be the favorite of Superman’s girlfriend—the Cheerios or Malboros of wine.

This is part of a series called What Were They Drinking? co-posted at my wine and social criticism blog, The Nightly Glass.

Also recommended– the archive of old advertisements on the Riunite website. The theme-song might get stuck in your head, but they’re pretty amazing cultural artifacts.

House Wine: Obvious Child’s Cheap Anonymous Red

Posted on September 1, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

Wine signifies wealth on film. The successful boyfriend in the beer-fueled Drinking Buddies packs wine on a picnic hike. Robocop’s cocaine kingpin drinks it at work. In Say Anything, the heroine’s affluent family grills her blue-collar boyfriend while sipping from crystal glasses.

This connotation obscures a fundamental truth about wine: that it is often the cheapest booze available. A bottle of wine costs as little as a few dollars. Yet many film-goers would not recognize whether a bottle was expensive or cheap just from the look of it. Plenty of cheap wines have fancy labels, while prestigious boutique producers use the same eye-catching, colorful designs as mass-produced corporate brands. (Highly branded wines are the easiest to identify. Many people have a basic understanding that ‘Silver Oak’ is expensive, which underlies its popularity despite its poor price value.) If a glass of wine isn’t known to be high class, its assumed to be aspirational of high class. The same could be said of wine drinkers.

A pile of cans’ or ‘a flask’ visually connote cheap drinking more effectively, but their representation becomes inextricably tied with characterizations of desperation, and recklessness. So chalk it up to Obvious Child, whose heroine Donna finds herself knocked up by a relative stranger after losing her job, apartment, and serious boyfriend, to be the movie that documents the reality of the struggling wine consumer.

As a time capsule for the 2010s Brooklyn, Obvious Child captures the sparse apartments, the well-worn bars, and silent taxi rides of an urban twenty-something’s (and thirty something’s) life. It also articulates its character’s drinking behaviors just as accurately. In Obvious Child, wine is only drunk at home, and its always red (the film is set in winter.) A lonesome comedian spills a good deal on his shirt, during a doomed seduction of attempt in his bachelor pad. Donna and her friends drink wine over dinner, haranguing and playfully debating women’s rights.

On the other hand, these characters order call drinks and beer at the bar, (notably hipster-staple Pabst Blue Ribbon and Brooklyn Lager by Brooklyn Brewery.) Donna and her date don’t order wine at the Italian restaurant, where it would be most stock in trade. Which makes perfect sense: ordering a glass out in New York City would start at $7 at the absolute cheapest. Buying the bottle at a store is almost always cheaper. At a bar, the choice is between a good beer and a decent to terrible wine for $2-4 more. At home, the choice is between a six pack of good beer and a decent to terrible wine for $5 less. And if someone is bent on spending that $7, the cocktail will at least be stronger, and wouldn’t make you sleepy.

obviouschild_hiquality

Unfortunately, its difficult to determine how expensive the wines in Obvious Child are. Only one wine is potentially identifiable. Toward the beginning, Donna leaves a series of drunken voice mails on her ex’s line. She swaggers, jeers, back-pedals, hurls her phone, and brandishes a bottle of red wine. Bottles accumulate on the bedside table and dresser as the night drags on. The low quality of the video before makes it hard to tell, but the cheery yellow label and neck foil are emblazoned with a logo of a black sun. Personalized neck foils are usually only found on highly mass-produced wines, where the extra brand-ability justifies the extra expense. Small production wineries opt for solid color neck foils manufactured for general use. The sun logo suggests a balmy appellation like Spain or Central California, which coincidentally are areas well suited to producing hundreds of thousands of tons of cheap, ripe grapes. The logo is nearly a silhouette of the Mirassou logo, and the yellow foil recalls Cupcake, two grocery story brands. (Except in New York, where wine can only be sold in liquor stores.) In its own way, this label is actually a pinnacle of iconicity—its so iconic, it evokes other generic brands without even being identifiable itself. A couple dozen wine store and website searches through NYC turned up empty. In fact, its possible that the wine is Mirrasou from a previous marketing cycle. Whatever it is, the wine looks polished and is probably priced at a dollar or two cheaper than the brands it rips off. Donna clearly stocked up in advance, which would have been between $6-$8 at a local wine shop. She even drinks it out of a mason jar.

Still, there are times when beer should be drunk in house. Especially when its purchased after midnight, and all that’s open is the deli below the apartment. Or, when its the only thing on hand at a young man’s apartment. Wine may be a cheap drinking option, but Donna’s wine consumption is as gendered as its close pint-of-ice cream correlate. David Cross, dressed in a ridiculous tank top, is feminized for comedic affect, (not unproblematically,) when he drinks wine later in the film. When Donna and her one-night-stand, Max, drunkenly revel through the wee hours of the night, they’re pounding local microbrews, (Brooklyn Lager and Sweet Action from Sixpoint Brewery.) The shining silver cans ornament the blissful scene of the two kids parading and messing around, which unfolds to the Paul Simon song from which the movie takes its name. This is also the moment that immediately precedes their off-screen, unprotected sex. The conflict and title of the movie are linked together in a moment of innocent bacchanalia.

Obvious Child is a comedy, but it also a fairly realistic portrait of a young woman making the decision to have an abortion. No matter where audiences fall politically, both sides would agree that this is a serious situation that preferably would have been avoided. It would be easy for the film to jettison Donna’s life-choices, if only to better illustrate her deepened maturity at the end. The bottle swigging and beer pounding could have been shown as problematic and unstable. Yet the drinking is shown normally, neutrally, with a streak of slapstick. It doesn’t seem to be part of the problem. Similarly, Donna doesn’t seem remorseful about her choices. She doesn’t waver in resolve to get an abortion, or agonize with guilt about it. She grows up a little, notably in her ability to connect with others, but without giving up pieces of herself. Obvious Child fiercely insists on the normalcy of Donna’s decision to have an abortion, and of the decisions that led her there. It doesn’t reject Hollywood’s conflation of cheap-drinking, immaturity, and bad choices, as much as say “Hey, we’re all human here. Let’s be generous.”

This post is part of the series on wine representation in film, called What Were They Drinking?!, co-posted on The Nightly Glass.

Wine Looks Bad On Film: On Shopgirl

Posted on June 11, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

This post is part of the series, What Were They Drinking?!, and was originally posted on The Nightly Glass. Part two will post next week.

Most stories feature wine as a prop, and little more. A bottle of wine indicates that this is that kind of dinner party, that kind of restaurant, or that kind of aristocrat or bohemian. A film audience can distinguish whether its white or red, sparkling or still, but that’s about it. Less commonly, there are books and films and songs which concern wine, like Sideways. A middle ground is rarer still, where wine becomes a nearly silent device with which the characters work out their desires and conflicts, without traveling to a vineyard, or making stirring monologues about Pinot Noir. Few book, screen and song-writers realize that a character’s glass of wine reveals as much about them as a dog-eared copy of The Sun Also Rises, or a Ramones poster.

Steve Martin seems to understand this. Wine threads through both the novella and film formats of Shopgirl. Wine drinking is also one of the few ways the two versions meaningfully depart from each other. Both tell the story of a Mirabelle, a shy, waifish art school graduate who works in the neglected glove department of a luxury department store. Mirabelle struggles to meaningfully connect with people, and is medicated for depression. When courted by a wealthy, well-meaning divorcee, she waylays her uncertainty for hopes of a lasting relationship. The divorcee turns out to be as emotionally limited as the mistress-like role he proscribes for Mirabelle, who leaves him, takes control of her life, and happily gets together with Jeremy, the lost-soul from the b-plot. Everyone “grows up” and self-actualizes. Claire Danes plays Mirabelle, Jason Schwartzman plays Jeremy, and the divorcee, Ray Porter, is played by author, screenwriter and director Steve Martin. In both versions, an omniscient voice, (again, Steve Martin,) narrates the characters’ internal dramas with tender, if patronizing, candor.

©Touchstone Pictures, 2005

Mirabelle eagerly drinks wine in the book. She abstains in the film. In the book’s first date, Ray is attracted to Mirabelle’s desire to learn about wine, and audibly orders a Barolo. In the film, they crack a joke—“Red wine?” “What shade?” “Maroon.” “Bring me a maroon wine.” While unfinished glasses pile up on the film’s tables and bed-stands, Mirabelle never visibly puts a glass to her lips, and turns down all spoken offers of wine. Meanwhile, wine becomes inseparable from Ray. It codes him as a member of the cool, collected elite, sipping away on his private jet. (In fact, that shot zooms in on the glass, just to be clear.) He drinks wine alone, eating Chinese food, and while wistfully overlooking the Los Angeles skyline. He snubs the old wine Mirabelle offers him from her fridge. Even the close up as he pours water resembles the glamour shot on a box of Franzia. Yet the one instance where he gets sloppily drunk with another woman, and then tries to honorably correct the situation, is not included in the film. Film-Ray is always controlled and sophisticated, yet never quite gallant.

©Touchstone Pictures, 2005

Along these lines, the film cuts Ray’s internal monologues. Fewer voice-overs make for better films, yet the baby is thrown out with bathwater, and the removal of Ray’s vulnerabilities reduces him to a sex driven automaton, only human when regretting the loss of Mirabelle ‘too late.’ Their closing dialogue might have been copied from the book, but the film’s melodrama is a new addition, where Ray appears as a lost and lonely man, watching Mirabelle and Jeremy triumphantly, (theatrically!) embrace under a shower of flower petals. In the book, Mirabelle and Ray’s intimacy remains intact, if dormant, and their parting appears less tragic for Ray.

©Touchstone Pictures, 2005

If a glass of wine paints Ray as a sophisticated aristocrat deserving of punishment, it plays into the Madonna-whore complex for women. Sipping wine, Mirabelle reveals that she is tempted to be worldly. Eagerly drinking it would signal that she succumbs. Refusing wine, she appears virtuous and innocent. Mirabelle obviously drinks wine through the story, but the audience only watches her resist it. Wine is something that brings Ray and Mirabelle together in the book, but separates them on film. Part of the problem is that a filmed glass of wine triggers the memory of all the glasses of wine poured in movies before it, and who tended to drink them—mostly wealthy villains. By participating in the popular iconography of wine as a dangerous class luxury, a connotation developed over centuries in popular film, theatre and illustrated pulp literature, the film Shopgirl plays into the classic Hollywood dichotomies of good versus evil, rural versus urban, honesty versus sophistication, and alcohol versus temperance, which were largely absent in the book.

For example, Shopgirl’s storyline doesn’t seem so far from D W Griffith’s 1920 re-creation of a typical nineteenth century theatrical, “Way Down East,” where lustful aristocrat Lennox lures country girl Anna into an out-of-wedlock arrangement, and destroys her honor. Cast out of society, she is nearly about to perish on an ice floe when the young, noble farmboy David comes to her rescue and marries her. Mirabelle’s reputation never suffers, (although, it would be interesting to see how Jeremy and her parents would react,) yet Way Down East’s subtitles eerily mirror Martin’s writing in a number of places. Mirabelle wants to be in a committed, monogamous relationship with Ray. He fails her and leads her on, causing her much heart-ache, and contributing to a paralyzing depression. Way Down East begins,

“Today Woman brought up from childhood to expect ONE CONSTANT MATE possibly suffers more than at any point in the history of mankind, because not yet has the man-animal reached his high standards`– except perhaps in theory..”

Suddenly, Mirabelle and Jeremy’s almost nonsensical exchange toward the end of the film makes sense:

Mirabelle: “Jeremy—So what made you do all this?”

Jeremy: “All this what?”

M: “All this… success?”

J: (beat) “Well, you did.”

M: “I did? How?”

J: “Well you said, ‘Just do it.’ So I did it.”

M: “Well, that’s not very much.”

J: “Yeah, but I’ll protect you.”

They embrace and Mirabelle begins to cry.

On its own, “I’ll protect you” seems like a bizarre non-sequitur. But it flows from the heart of this relationship—Anna/Mirabelle inspires David/Jeremy, who offers his devotion and protection from the corrupted influences that seek her. This is the classic romantic model of centuries of British and American melodrama, a narrative mode that partly developed to address (and sensationalize) the changes and social ills that came with industrialization—poverty, urbanization, race, youth culture, women and child abuse, and alcoholism being prevalent themes. Temperance movies comprised an entire genre of early film, and politicians and activists drew on melodramatic tropes to convince voters to ban alcohol state by state. Melodramatic visuals, like families cowering beneath violent, drunk husbands, contributed greatly to the passing of prohibition. Temperance activists cast alcohol as an evil of the city—conveniently, immigrants concentrated in urban areas, and tended to defend balanced consumption as a part of daily life. Alcohol thus became enveloped in a race war, and the enemy of the honest, American, white male hero. These tropes did not die, but engendered the formulas, frameworks and narratives at the heart of current politics and film-making. It is not easy to imagine Superman drinking wine, (although he only insists “he doesn’t drink when he’s flying.”) And between Betty and Veronica, the future wine drinker is an obvious choice. It doesn’t make Veronica evil, but it lines up with her frivolous, stuck up, aggressive nature.

©Touchstone Pictures, 2005

Wine drinking, portrayed in Shopgirl as an aristocratic tendency, seems to have no part in Mirabelle’s life after Ray. Mirabelle collects herself in her parent’s rural Vermont home, and drinks a beer after the break-up. Wine, constantly associated with Ray’s appetite, becomes conflated with exploitation. Judging by the wines mentioned and featured, Martin may be a connoisseur, but as a director, he failed to reverse the negative connotations carried by a glass of wine in a rich man’s hand. Combined with the physical bodies of the actors, ceaselessly articulating their age difference, largely understood to be inappropriate, the film sets a moral battle where there had been mutualism and humanity in the text.

©Touchstone Pictures, 2005

Best Drunk Standing On One Foot

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

There’s a point where wine news becomes real news. I’ve begun to hear about experimental psychologist Charles Spence’s “colour lab” from friends as well as wine writers. This is the crucial moment when a hypothesis becomes an urban legend, like red-wine headaches or health benefits, doomed to be repeated ad infinitum by shoppers at the local wine sore.

The colour lab’s finding: that colors, lights and sounds affect how people taste wine. The gripping conclusion: “[Spence] envisages it trickling down to consumer products in the near future, such as lighting and music suggestions on packaging, or sensory apps.”

Joy of joys.

It’s nice to have a little proof, however shaky, that everyone’s a little synesthetic, and that changes in lighting, color, music, and sound can change someone’s perception of a wine. Perhaps this is a two way street, full of unmapped and unintended consequences: could a glass of dark, bitterly tannic Aglianico del Vulture push a troubled relationship into a break-up, over one dinner conversation? Could a critic, sipping a vapid Trebbiano from a plastic cup at a Chelsea gallery opening, dismiss an artist’s work as vapid, and overly dependent of the color grey? (Or, even worse, praise it for its wispy, post-post-modern disinterestedness?)

As intriguing as they are, these results should be backed up– or contested— by actually rigorous studies in controlled environments. Laboratories may seem artificial, but they are much more controlled than street festivals. Ideally they are less susceptible to a sense of occasion. Experiments don’t always necessarily yield ‘events,’ or great findings that can change the face of wine-drinking as we know it. Which is the problem of hosting an experiment at a bona fide carnival– even the skeptics might be inclined, a few glasses in, to exaggerate the differences they’ve perceived. Everyone wants to be part of something landmark, or something crazy. With all the pomp and circumstance of black glasses and a high-tech installation environment, attendees could enter into the tent assuming that they were supposed to find differences between the green and red lights, that their palates are wrong or dull for not finding them. Especially when the experiment starts with the probe, “Are you a super taster or not? Here, lets find out.” After licking the paper strip, the declared super tasters are ready to try out their new super tasting powers (which actually should guard against discerning light and music based differences.) Having just been told they are not special, the non-super tasters are still struggling to find the mark, and are practically searching for nuances. It’s like going into the funhouse, and being unable to tell why the mirrors are funky. People will want to find differences, not only for the excitement of it, but because they are validated for finding them.

Spence’s test illustrates that for all the awards and point scores, people are willing to understand wine subjectively. Going further, that people will still reach for objective ‘solutions,’ like that red light creates sweet flavors, in the face of wine’s obvious-as-the-sun subjectivity. Which is rather profound. The experiment does not deliver hard and fast rules as to how people associate taste with vision and hearing. For every drinker that associates ‘red’ with ‘sweet,’ there may be someone who associates it with ‘spice,’ or even ‘blood.’ Plus, if sound and light affect the palate, who’s to say that the texture of clothing, or sound of other people’s voices won’t affect a wine too? The idea that the trilling of flutes will routinely evoke the same taste perceptions is ridiculous– even synesthetic people don’t share the same associations.

If lighting and music suggestions appear on the back of wine labels, I’m not sure if I’ll want to laugh, or cry. Most likely I’ll just shrug it off. The current label fodder darling, food pairings, is nearly as ridiculous, (by the way, roasted chicken goes with just about EVERY wine.) I doubt that most consumers match the wine to the recommended steaks and salmon dishes, and probably ignore the advice, or buy wines which reference foods they only wish they were eating. Similarly, any wine drinkers doubt that a wine can taste like the described ripe peaches or tobacco. Many others believe there are no differences to be discerned at all, because consumers regularly cannot tell the difference between an expensive and cheap wine (which is a fallacy, and covered here.) Back labels and wine rituals already cause enough confusion. Why put even more in the way of people’s appreciation?

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This post originally appeared on The Nightly Glass, a wine and culture blog.

On Lions and Tigers And Bears And Wine

Posted on May 5, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

Panel from Sean K’s ‘My First Panic Attack,’ 2011

For obvious reasons, American children are not introduced to a ‘canon’ of great wines in school. Instead, we grow up sifting through culture for cues and shorthands to help us decide what to drink. Some men tend to drink red exclusively, fearing that white is feminine. People stay away from Merlot in part because it was disparaged in the movie Sideways, (despite the fact that the protagonist’s most prized possession is a bottle of a Merlot based wine.) Buyers stick to famous place-names like Bordeaux, Chianti and Napa, while avoiding lesser known regions. At the same time, they’ll call just about any sparkling wine ‘Champagne,’ even if it wasn’t grown and made there. In the end, people prefer to buy by varietal, like ‘Cabernet Sauvignon’ or ‘Pinot Noir,’ rather than the growing region. Most people wouldn’t be able to point to Bordeaux on a map, and if they haven’t been there, they don’t care about it. But they’ve had a ‘Cab’ before, and know they liked it, and hear good things about it, so what the heck.

What does a winery do when they are not from a famous region? Or making wines from lesser known varietals? How do consumers differentiate one Cab from another? The people who have the most money and time to figure out these questions are large, multi-million dollar wine companies. Additionally, they ask, how can a large mass-producer disguise the fact that there is nothing special about their wine? The answer: to market it kind of like a book– or a gimmick at Spencer’s Gifts. Slap a cool sounding name on it, and an appealing image, and send it to market. People will want to buy it, because the name is a hoot, and its stacked in a pyramid, so it must be a big deal. To be honest, most people don’t have a specific reason for getting a Bordeaux, so why not get the one with the crazy label instead?

In 2000, the bulk-bottled Australian import Yellowtail arrived on American store shelves. It was cheap, and had a stylized Kangaroo on the label. Half cartoon, half Aboriginal sketch, the kangaroo was sophisticated enough for a dinner-party, but ridiculous enough to call attention to itself. Yellowtail did not start the ‘critter label’ fad, but it does exemplify it. Little Penguin, Smoking Loon, Dancing Bull and Gato Negro come to mind, as does Tussock Jumper, where every varietal in the line is symbolized by a different animal wearing a red sweater. Some of the best-known luxury wineries, like Screaming Eagle and Duckhorn and Frogs Leap, preceded this trend, yet profit from and increasingly engage in it.

Critter labels soon drew the ire and exasperation of wine critics, disgusted that so much attention could be drummed up for such mass-produced plonk. The marketing strategy seemed infantile and manipulative: people like animals, and like to purchase things with animals on them. Critter labels are so stupid they’re savvy– they play into our earliest associations with the countries that supply bulk wine, like Australia, South Africa, Spain and Argentina. We may not know much about these countries, but we’ve been watched Bugs Bunny bull-fight from birth, and grew up identifying Australia with kangaroos. France and Italy don’t have signature animals, but they don’t need them either; we associate France with wine, not with roosters. (Yet Le Vielle Ferme displays a prominent rooster on the label, in any case.)

For all that’s been said against critter labels, and for their weird colonial baggage, (Australia= exotic animals!) at least they sort-of, sometimes hint at the provenance of a wine, and insist that this is important information for the consumer. In most industries, this is a laughable anachronism. Who cares where one’s toothpaste or phone come from? Yet with fine wines, the place of origin is the reason it will taste a certain way, and when you smell it, remind you of certain things, and highlight different kinds of memories. The place determines how the wine will be meaningful to you, in and of itself. With bulk wines, not so much. Too many grapes from too many places went into it, and the wine has been stripped of its unique characteristics, so as to ensure shelf life and uniformity. These wines can be good, and are dependable, but not particularly meaningful. Like toothpaste. So its no surprise that the industry has developed another method, where the origin and varietals are incidental, and the brand and concept becomes the only thing that matters. In order for this to work, the brand has to be alluring, a little shocking, and “share-worthy.”

The shamelessly trendy marketing strategy is now the creepy label.

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The Prisoner might be the king of creepy labels. It was originally created by Orin Swift, who has a whole line of disturbing labels, featuring knives and dismembered mannequins and jarring Dadaist collages. At Weilands in Columbus, OH, I was pleased to find The Prisoner posed against JC Cellar’s The Impostor– had the store actually sorted them this way? Then I looked around me:

What is this, Halloween? Even labels I wouldn’t have found creepy beforehand begin to seem a little nocturnal, and frightening. Slo Down’s Sexual Chocolate suddenly looks like it had been scrawled by a demented person. Sans Liege’s Groundwork appeared to be straight out of a Brothers Quay animation. Below them sat 19 Crimes, (opportunistically displaying another prisoner on the label,) and the ubiquitous Apothic Red at the bottom of the shelf. Copolla’s Zoetrope recalled a Kara Walker silhouette. Even critter labels like the Coniglio bunny, and Dashe’s monkey, appeared insidious. And look at all those black capsules, lined up together like a row of fascist uniforms.

It’s hard not to see parallels in pop culture at large– like the rise in vampire and zombie properties. There’s the Golden Age of Television, which often can be reduced to the Golden Age of Gritty Shows About Conflicted Sociopaths. Turn on the TV, and you’re as likely to find a show about a witch coven or serial killer as a sitcom. ‘Witch house‘ is arguably a musical genre, (or at least a style,) and artists like Future Islands and Tyler, the Creator physically menace their audiences. “Epic battle” style orchestrations straight out of Lord of the Rings grind alongside the hours of run-up footage to the Superbowl, and the entirety of the Olympics. Dimly lit, heavily paneled Speakeasy bars are popping up like daisies. Since the mid to late 2000s, everything must have gravitas, roiling drama, tainted love.

Why not wine too? Its not a far leap of the imagination. In movies, wine is most often drunk by cruel, corrupted villains. More positively, a glass of wine denotes sophistication and mastery– which narratively belong to the bad-guy, not the girl or boy-next-door. Creepy labels play into this understanding.

They also make wine fun. Creepy labels are rebellious, because they are not quite classy. Yet more than anything, they are nostalgic. They are just as accessible as critter labels. What is this flood of dark, gritty imagery, if not an appeal to take the things we loved (and feared) as children seriously? No one ever needs to grow up, because ghost stories and Batman and Harry Potter are for adults. And children’s pajamas. At the same time.

Creepy labels are also a way of making wine a little more guy-friendly. Women drink wine alongside villains. For instance, The Drinks Business recently reported “Men Fear Ridicule Over Ordering Wine” as a headline. Meanwhile, darkness and femininity have been equated for eons. Edgy male characters can appropriate shadowy, ‘feminine’ characteristics while retaining their masculinity. Just like femme fatales, they can seduce, dress well, drink wine, and modulate their voices to be sweet one moment, biting the next, and still remaine masculine. These behaviors are also vaguely aristocratic. While the gap between the rich and poor widens, this is a seductive visage to adopt, even if it is considered less than virtuous.

The safest way for a man to do feminine things is to be diabolical while doing them. Paradoxically, this becomes the most powerful way for a woman to be feminine– to be a woman playing a man playing at being a woman. Rates of wine drinking are rising rapidly amongst young men and women, who in turn re-negotiate what drinking wine ‘means.’ At least with red-blends, the fastest growing category, this re-negotiation confirms Hollywood’s typecasting, while weakening people’s connection to what wine actually is– an expression of a varietal, from a place. How convenient for industrial size producers, who will cloak their wine refineries and tanker trucks with a sexy vampire shroud.

Meanwhile, men and women can be united at last in their choice of blood-red blends with titillating names, leaning aloofly over vintage bars, and decorating the kitchen table with mysterious black bottles. Whoever brings the most sinister wine to the party wins.

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This piece is an amalgamation of two posts that went up on The Nightly Glass, a wine in culture blog. I’m hoping to make it like The Hooded Utiltiarian equivalent for wine, beer and spirits criticism, and would appreciate it if you check it out!

Robocop (1987): Chianti in the Rock Shop

Posted on April 7, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

Wine is a great accouterment for villains. Aristocratic and impenetrable, a glass of red can suggest that its drinker lounges about, sipping the blood of his enemies and chuckling evilly from the shadows. White wines code the airy disconnect of the elite, aestheticized and cruelly indifferent of everyman struggles. Hannibal drinks Chianti and eats people, and the merciless denizens of Elysium drink whites at garden parties in space. Wine conveys authority, but it’s a fairly obvious power-play. And a better villain can out-power that power-play. Enter Clarence Boddicker.

Kurtwood Smith’s performance in the original Robocop is one of a kind. Boddicker’s smile is vicious, but disturbingly sweet. One moment he squirms with glee, only to be still and deadly the next. He’s the ringleader of a hysterical, trigger-happy gang, which more than anything resembles a group of bros gone wrong. Which is a great reminder for the goonish underbelly of many male-bonding narratives.

But Boddicker doesn’t dominate as much as destabilize. He’s balding and bespectacled, yet emotes childishly. He throws tantrums. He unpins a grenade with his tongue, peering down at his quarry with an odd, come-hither look in his eyes, practically miming to his employer’s recorded assassination statement. Boddicker’s interaction with the one glass of wine in the film is no less subversive. When demanding a cut in the price of cocaine, Boddicker sticks two of his fingers into a drug lord’s glass of Ruffino Riserva Ducale, and then snorts the drops from his fingers. Even better, the drug lord then picks up the glass, and in a bizarre act of social facilitation, takes a sip.

It’s interesting that the wine appears here, in a cocaine factory, and not in the hands of one of the privileged board members of the evil corporation OCP. While it would have been ridiculous for wine to be served at their meetings, its equally absurd for it to appear in Sal’s rock shop. Not to mention that Ruffino Riserva Ducale is prestigious. Karen McNeil deems it a ‘must’ to try in The Wine Bible, “One of the leading producers of traditional Chianti… its Ruffino’s Chianti Claissico riserva called Riserva Ducale that is the jewel in the crown.” Sal’s bottle looks to be contemporary to the ‘80s; a current vintage Riserva Ducale would cost about $25 retail, and about $50 or more in a restaurant. Not a rare or overly expensive wine, but not cheap either, and Sal seems to be drinking it casually. Which is a power statement in itself—Ruffino Riserva Ducale is his house wine, even when it can be barely tasted over the wafting powder. Drinking Ducale in a cocaine factory reduces the wine to an empty signifier of prowess and sophistication. Snorting it is a more honest admission of what it is—a power trip.

Ruffino Riserva Ducale Vinages: 2001 (Standard label), 1953 (Standard label), 1980 (Gold label)…The packaging in the still is definitely from the 80s.

A quick dip into the history of Chianti reveals a stranger layer at play. Up until the seventies, Americans knew Chianti as a cheap, barely palatable wine in a straw bottle. While Chianti must be primarily made with the black grape Sangiovese, misguided Tuscan wine laws permitted—then required– the inclusion of Trebbiano and Malvasia into the blend, which are (usually) characterless white grape varietals that are easy to grow. This stretched the Sangiovese a little further, but watered down the quality significantly. While there had always been a tradition of making Chiantis for cellaring, like Riserva Ducale, their reputation was harnessed to the low esteem for the basic Chiantis.

In the early seventies, Ruffino was one of the first producers to do away with the straw bottle, and presumably decrease the amount of white grapes in the mix. Other producers created “super-Tuscans,” highly lauded, heavy-weight Cabernet Sauvignon blends that often, but not always, included Sangiovese. As these didn’t conform to existing wine laws, they couldn’t be labeled Chianti, and their popularity mirrored the success of the renegade wineries in Napa, California. In order to compete with these non-Chiantis, a “Chianti Classico” designation was created in 1984, which required 80% or more of the blend to be Sangiovese, harvested from only the most traditional growing areas, and the final 20% comprised of black grapes like Cabernet, Merlot, Canaiolo or Colorino. However, the use of white grapes wasn’t completely outlawed until 2006.

Chianti’s reputation progressed enough for Hannibal to name-drop it in Silence of the Lambs in 1991. Parallel movements occurred at the same time in Piemonte, with Barolo and Barbaresco, and throughout the whole of Italy by the late 80s. Italy attracted the attention of American wine critics and their high scores—and a preference for large, fruity wines. For better or for worse, Italian wines changed to fit American palates. In turn, America replaced fantasies of France with rustic Italy, for a variety of reasons ranging between changing kitchen habits and Reaganism. As covered by Lawrence Osborne, in The Accidental Connoisseur,

“Unlike the French, Italians were spontaneous, unsnooty, casual, unpretentiously friendly, and family-oriented—that is, much more like Americans themselves….The huge success of Italian-sounding wines like Gallo and Mondavi had much to do with this commercialized idea of Italy: the Italian family seated around the Mediterranean banquets in golden sunshine. Somehow Italy… had the innocent energy of nature. Like fruit-and-veggie-packed wine itself, that sun-kissed land had about it a whiff of the health food store.”

Meanwhile, Mayor Giuliani was patching broken windows and gentrifying Manhattan, with its heavily Italian heritage, into a safe haven for the wealthy. Film experienced the renaissance of the Italian mob-boss, who took hold of the American imagination with Coppola’s The Godfather in 1972, and was a mainstay by Scorsese’s Goodfellas in 1990, about the time Italian wines went from plonk to paragon.

Sal, wine glass in hand, registers this transformation. Authoritative, barely accented and dressed in a khaki suit, Sal is the image of late-eighties self-indulgence. He barely registers as a bad guy in comparison with Boddicker, who derisively calls him a ‘wop.’ Sal is the image of elevated crime, with a mob pedigree, which he signals not with course stereotypes, but with his enlightened, Italian wine habits. Boddicker’s gesture calls his bluff, replying that crime is always a kind of perversity. By not relying on racial signfiers, and instead including this vinous conceit, Verhoeven can satirize mob movies, and the thuggish indulgence of Reaganism and the eighties, while avoiding actual racism against Italians.

Boddicker might be crazy, but he’s honest about who he is. Robocop attests that crime is chaos, twenty years before The Joker’s declares this in The Dark Knight. Boddicker and the titular Robocop oppose each other like order and anarchy, yet they exist on the same ethical axis, and importantly, are both revealed to be corporate puppets in the end. Sal floats off in cloud-cuckoo land, where there’s honor amongst thieves, or at least a hierarchy. Unfortunately for him, Robocop guns criminals down rather indiscriminately.

This post is the second in a continuing column, What Were They Drinking?!, featured on The Nightly Glass, and occasionally co-posted here on The Hooded Utilitarian.

The Grand Budapest Hotel’s Lost Pouilly-Jouvet

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Kailyn Kent

“Do it—and bring a bottle of the Pouilly-Jouvet ’26 in an ice bucket with two glasses so we don’t have to drink the cat-piss they serve in the dining car.”

It should not be surprising that a film about a luxury hotel features a few wine cameos. Nor should it be surprising that a comedy should make a joke of them. Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel more than delivers on both counts, and his characters’ stilted dialogue seems tailor-made for subtle wine farce. Characters pronounce wine names ridiculously, with baroque flourishes, only to quickly bury them under more talk. You have to be fast enough to catch the name, and faster still to catch that the name was actually a joke. This quirk makes Grand Budapest an oddly respectful film about connoisseurship—a certain amount of taste is required to comprehend what’s funny in the first place.

In Grand Budapest, Anderson rarely mentions a wine directly. He instead creates his own kind of ‘wine talk,’ fragmenting the obscure jargon of wine names, regions and styles, and stringing together passwords comprehensible only to the initiated. In an early scene, the owner of The Grand Budapest orders a red wine whose name I was not quick enough to catch, and then “a split of the brut.” Not a split of Champagne, nor a half-bottle of Pol Roger, Billecart Salmon Rosé, or Whatever Whatever. The former would have been obvious, and the second amateurishly showy. ‘A split of the brut’ delights in the absurdity of the language, its implied, abstracted violence (to cleaver a beast?) that can hardly be linked to that tiny bottle of dry Champagne. The server even brings a comically itty-bitty sample glass. Most sparkling wines are made dry, or ‘brut,’ and say so right on the label. As we rarely refer to a wine this way, (“I’ll have the brut”) the term slips under the surface of the cultural consciousness, its use reserved for eccentric experts.

A little later in the film, I wondered if Anderson had started to make things up. M. Gustave, the film’s intrepid concierge, demands a bottle of Pouilly Jouvet. I’m sorry—of Pouilly-Fuisse? A world-class Chardonnay from Burgundy, in Northeast France? Or Pouilly-Fumé, the renowned Sauvignon Blanc wines from the Loire river valley a little to the west? Is that what he meant by cat-piss– are they serving a cheaper Sauvignon Blanc in the dining car, maybe from South Africa or New Zealand? (Of course not, this is a period piece!) Going back to the script, he does in fact call for a Pouilly-Jouvet. A quick Internet search returned an answer that nicely fits Anderson’s nostalgic phantasmagoria.

At Allexperts.com, ‘John’ posted an inquiry to a ‘wine expert,’ asking if he knew of a Jouvet Pouilly-Fuisse, “an excellent wine but did not Bankrupt the vault [sic.]” In the mid seventies, it was about $10-15 dollars in a restaurant, and $9 to $10 in a store. Presumably restaurant mark-ups were much tamer then, although according to inflation calculators, a $10 bottle of wine would cost equivalently $43 now. The expert responds that Jouvet disappeared in the ‘80s, much like the Grand Budapest Hotel is supposed to have closed, sometime after the author-character visits in the late sixties, but before he wrote about the hotel in the mid eighties. Which is about the time young couples enjoyed bottles of Jouvet Pouilly-Fuisse in New York, an affordable luxury recalling a lost, less-modern Europe. The Tenenbaum children had probably just been born.

The Pouilly-Jouvet namelessly re-emerges near the end of the film, when M. Gustave, the owner’s younger self, and the owner’s wife repeat the train trip where they had first brought it. Before, police thugs hindered the owner and M. Gustave, but this time the scene is shot in black and white, there are real SS, and M. Gustave is arrested and assassinated off-screen. But not before the script directs him to throw his glass of wine into the face of his executors.

In Anderson’s world, wine is flamboyant but innocent, like M. Gustave, and the hotel itself. As M. Gustave and the hotel owner dually put it, “there are faint glimmers of civilization left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as humanity.” Wine is an absurd protest against militarism, modernism, and whatever else you can say Anderson’s Nazis represent. Yet its absurdity makes its resistance all the more potent. A happy indulgence, fine wine can neither integrate with modernity nor its mercenary expediency, and is lost to time instead.

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This post is the first in a continuing column, What Were They Drinking?!, featured on The Nightly Glass, and occasionally co-posted here on The Hooded Utilitarian. I also wrote a longer piece on service in The Grand Budapest Hotel here.

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Robocop (1987): Chianti in the Rock Shop

The Grand Budapest Hotel’s Lost Pouilly-Jouvet